In my article, The Third International and Its Place in History (The Communist International No. 1, May 1, 1919, p. 38 of the Russian edition), I pointed to one of the outstanding symptoms of the ideological bankruptcy of members of the old, putrid, Berne International. This bankruptcy of the theoreticians of the reactionary socialism which did not understand the dictatorship of the proletariat found expression in the proposal made by the German “independent” Social-Democrats to join, unite, combine the bourgeois parliament with a form of Soviet power.

Kautsky, Hilferding, Otto Bauer and Co., the most outstanding
theoreticians of the old International, did not realise that they
were proposing to combine the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with
the dictatorship of the proletariat! The men who made names for
themselves and won the sympathies of the workers by their advocacy
of the class struggle and by the proofs they advanced of its
necessity, failed to realise—at the crucial moment of the
struggle for socialism—that they were betraying the whole
doctrine of the class struggle, were renouncing it completely and
actually deserting to the camp of the bourgeoisie by their attempt
to combine the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the
dictatorship of the proletariat. This sounds incredible, but it is
a fact.

By way of a rare exception, we have managed to receive in
Moscow a fairly large number of foreign newspapers, although not
of consecutive dates, so that we are now able to retrace in
greater detail—although not in complete detail, of
course—the history of the vacillation of those gentlemen,
the “Independents”, on the most important theoretical
and practical question of the present day. This is the question of
the relation between dictatorship (of the proletariat) and
democracy (bourgeois), or between Soviet power and bourgeois
parliamentarisin.

In his pamphlet Die Diktatur des Proletariats (Wien,
1918) Herr Kautsky wrote that “the Soviet form of
organisation is one of the most important phenomena of our
time. It promises to acquire decisive importance in the great
decisive battles between capital and labour towards which we are
marching” (p. 33 of Kautsky’s pamphlet). And he added
that the Bolsheviks made a mistake in converting the Soviets from
“a combat organisation of one class”
into “a state organisation” and thereby
“destroying democracy” (ibid.).

In my pamphlet The
Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
(Petrograd and Moscow, 1918) I examined this argument of
Kautsky’s in detail and showed him to be completely
oblivious of the fundamental tenets of Marxism on the state; for
the state (every state, including the most democratic republic) is
nothing more nor less than a machine in the hands of one class for
the suppression of another. To describe the Soviets as the combat
organisation of a class, and deny them the right to convert
themselves into a “state organisation”, is
actually tantamount to renouncing the ABC of socialism,
proclaiming, or advocating, that the bourgeois machine for the
suppression of the proletariat (that is, the bourgeois-democratic
republic, the bourgeois state) should remain inviolate; it is
actual desertion to the camp of the bourgeoisie.

The absurdity of Kautsky’s position is so glaring, the
pressure exerted by the masses of the workers who are demanding
Soviet power is so strong, that Kautsky and his followers have
been obliged to make an ignominious retreat; they have got
themselves into a muddle, for they lack the courage honestly to
admit their mistake.

On February 9, 1919, Freiheit (Freedom), the organ of
the “Independent” (of Marxism, but absolutely
dependent on petty-bourgeois democracy) Social-Democrats of
Germany, contained an article by Herr Hilferding. In this article
the author is already demanding that the Workers’
Councils should be converted into a state organisation, but that
they should exist side by side with the bourgeois
parliament, the National Assembly, and together with it. On
February 11, 1919, in an appeal to the German proletariat, this
slogan was accepted by the entire Independent Party (and
consequently, also by Flerr Kautsky, who thereby contradicted the
statements he had made in the autumn of 1918L

This attempt to combine the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie
with the dictatorship of the proletariat is a complete
renunciation of Marxism and of socialism in general; forgotten are
the experiences of the Russian Mensheviks and
Socialist-Revolutionaries who from May 6, 1917 to October 25, 1917
(old style) made the “experiment” of combining the
Soviets as a “state organisation” with the
bourgeois state and failed ignominiously.

At the Party Congress of the Independents (held at the
beginning of March 1919) the entire Party accepted this supremely
sagacious proposal to combine Workers’ Councils with
bourgeois parliamentarism. But Freiheit No. 178, of April
13, 1919 (Supplement) reported that the “Independent”
group at the Second Congress of Workers’ Councils had
proposed the following resolution:

“The Second Congress of Workers’ Councils takes its
stand on the Workers’ Council system. Accordingly, the
political and economic structure of Germany shall be based on
the Councils (fibteorganisation). The Councils are the elected
representative bodies of the working population in all spheres
of political and economic life.”

In addition to this, the same group submitted to the Congress a
draft of “directives” (Richtlinien) in
which we read the following:

“All political power is concentrated in the
hands of the Congress of Workers’ Councils ....”
“The right to elect and be elected to the Councils shall be
enjoyed by all, irrespective of sex, who perform socially
necessary and useful labour and do not exploit the labour of
others ....”

..We see, therefore, that the “independent” leaders
have turned out to be paltry philistines who are entirely
dependent upon the philistine prejudices of the most backward
section of the proletariat. In the autumn of 1918, these
leaders, through their mouthpiece Kautsky, completely rejected
the idea of the Workers’ Councils being converted into
state organisations. In March 1919, following in the wake of the
masses of the workers, they surrender this position. In April
1919, they throw the decision of their Congress overboard and go
over entirely to the position of the Communists: “All
Power to the Workers’ Councils.”

Leaders of this type are not worth very much. There is no need
to have leaders to serve as an index of the temper of the most
backward section of the proletariat which marches in the rear and
not ahead of the vanguard. And considering the spineless way in
which they change their slogans, such leaders are worthless. They
cannot he trusted. They will always be mere ballast, a
minus quantity in the working-class movement.

The most “Left” of these leaders, a certain Herr Däumig,
argued as follows at the Party Congress (cf. Freiheit of March 9):

“Däumig stated that nothing stands
between him and the demand of the Communists for ’All Power
to the Workers’ Councils’. But he must protest against
the putschism practised by the Communist Party and against the
Byzantinism they display towards the masses instead of educating
them. Putschist, isolated action cannot lead to progress
....”

By putschisin the Germans mean what the old revolutionaries in
Russia, some fifty years ago, called “flashes”,
“pyrotechnics”, i.e., small conspiracies, attempts at
assassination, revolts, etc.

By accusing the Communists of being “putschists”,
Herr Dhumig merely betrays his own “Byzantinism”, his
own servility to the philistine prejudices of the petty
bourgeoisie. The “Leftism” of a gentleman of this
type, who repeats a “fashionable” slogan because he
fears the masses but does not understand the mass
revolutionary movement is not worth a brass farthing.

A powerful wave of spontaneous strikes is sweeping across
Germany. The proletarian struggle is evidently grow—big in
intensity to a degree unprecedented even in Russia in 1905, when
the strike movement rose to heights that had never been reached
before anywhere in the world. Anybody who speaks of
“pyrotechnics” in face of such a movement proves that
he is a hopeless vulgariser and a slave to philistine
prejudices.

Those philistine gentlemen headed by Däumig are
probably dreaming of a revolution (that is, if any idea of
revolution ever enters their heads) in which the masses will all
rise at once, fully organised.

Such revolutions never happen, nor can they happen. Capitalism
would not be capitalism if it did not keep millions of working
people, the vast majority of them, in a state of oppression,
wretchedness, want and ignorance. Capitalism cannot collapse
except fis a result of a revolution which, in the course of
struggle, rouses masses who had not hitherto been affected by
the movement. Spontaneous outbreaks become inevitable as the
revolution matures. There has never been a revolution in which
this has not, been the case, nor can there be such a
revolution,

Herr Däumig lies when he says that the Communists pander to
spontaneity; it is the same sort of lie that we heard so often
from the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The Communists
do not pander to spontaneity, they are not in
favour of isolated outbreaks. The Communists urge the masses to
take organised, integrated, united, opportune and mature
action. The philistine slander of Dumig, Kautsky and Co. cannot
refute this fact.

But the philistines cannot understand that the Communists quite
rightly regard it as their duty to be with the fighting masses
of the oppressed and not with the philistine heroes who stand
aloof from the struggle, timidly waiting to see how things turn
out. Mistakes are inevitable when the masses are fighting, but the
Communists remain with the masses, see these mistakes,
explain them to the masses, try to get them rectified, and strive
perseveringly for the victory of class-consciousness over
spontaneity. It is better to be with the fighting masses, who, in
the course of the struggle, gradually learn to rectify their
mistakes, than with the paltry intellectuals, philistines, and
Kautskyites, who hold aloof until “complete victory”
is achieved—this is the truth that the Däumigs cannot
understand.

The worse for them. They have already gone down in the history
of the world proletarian revolution as cowardly philistines,
reactionary sniveliers, yesterday the servants of. the
Scheidemanris and today the advocates of “social
peace”, and it does not matter whether that advocacy is
concealed by the combination of the Constituent Assembly with the
Workers’ Councils or by profound condemnation of
“putschism”.

Herr Kautsky has broken the record for substituting reactionary
philistine snivelling for Marxism. He does nothing else but bewail
what is taking place, complain, weep, express horror, and urge
conciliation! All his life this Knight of the Rueful Countenance
has been writing about the class struggle and about
socialism; but when the class stiuggle reached maximum intensity,
reached the threshold of socialism, our pundit lost his nerve,
burst into tears, and turned out to be a common or garden
philistine. In issue No. 98 of the organ of the Vienna traitors to
socialism, of the Austerlitzes, Renners and Bauers (A
rbeiterzeitung [Workers’ Gazette], April 9, 1919,
Vienna, morning edition), Kautsky for the hundredth, if not the
thousandth time, sums up all his lamentations in the following
words:

Economic thinking and economic
understanding,” he wails, “has been knocked out of the
heads of all classes ....” “The long war has
accustomed large sections of the proletariat to treat economic
conditions with absolute contempt and to place all their
confidence in the almighty power of violence ....”

These are the two “favourite points” of this
“extremely learned” man! The “cult of
violence” and the break-down of industry—this is what
has driven him to the usual, age-old, typical whining and
snivelling of the philistine instead of analysing the
real conditions of the class struggle. “We
expected”, he writes, “that the revolution would come
as the product of the proletarian class struggle ...”,
“but the revolution came as a consequence of the collapse of
the prevailing system in Russia and Germany in the
war..,.”

In other words, this pundit “expected” a peaceful
revolution! This is superb!

But Herr Kautsky has lost his nerve to such a degree that he
has forgotten what he himself wrote when he was a Marxist, namely,
that in all probability a war would provide the occasion for
revolution. Today, instead of calmly and fearlessly investigating
what changes must inevitably take place in the form of
the revolution as a consequence Of the war, our
“theoretician” bewails the collapse of his
“expectations”!

“... Large sections of the
proletariat ignore economic conditions!”

What utter piffle! How familiar the Menshevik press of Kerensky
days made this philistine refrain to us!

The economist Kautsky has forgotten that when a country has
been ruined by war and brought to the brink of disaster, the main,
the fundamental, the root “economic condition” is to
save the workers. If the working class is saved from
death from starvation, saved from perishing, it will be possible
to restore disrupted production. But in order to save the working
class it is necessary to have the dictatorship of the proletariat,
which is the only means of preventing the burdens and consequences
of the war from being thrust upon the shoulders of the
workers.

The economist Kautsky has “forgotten” that the
question of how the burdens of defeat are to be distributed is
determined by the class struggle, and that amidst the
conditions prevailing in an absolutely exhausted, ruined, starving
and dying country, the class struggle must inevitably
assume a different form. It is no longer a class struggle for a
share of the results of production, it is not a struggle to take
charge of production (for production is at a standstill, there is
no coal, the railways have been wrecked, the war has knocked
people out of their groove, the machines are worn out, and so on
and so forth) but a struggle to save the workers from
starvation. Only simpletons, even if very
“learned” ones, can “condemn”, under such
circumstances, “consumers’, soldiers” communism
and superciliously remind the workers of the importance of
production.

The first and foremost task is to save the workers. The
bourgeoisie want to retain their privileges, to thrust all the
consequences of the war upon the workers, and this means starving
the workers to death.

The working class wants to save itself from starvation, and for
this it is necessary to smash the bourgeoisie, first to
ensure consumption, even the most meagre, otherwise it will be
impossible to drag out even an existence of
semi-starvation, it will be impossible to hold out until
industry can be restarted.

“Think of production!” says the well-fed
bourgeoisie to the starving and exhausted workers. And Kautsky,
repeating the capitalists’ refrain in the guise of
“economic science”, becomes completely a lackey of the
bourgeoisie.

But the workers say that the bourgeoisie, too, should be put on
a semi-starvation ration, so that the working people might
recuperate somewhat, so that the working people may be saved
from death. “Consumers’ communism” is a
means of saving the workers. The workers must be saved, no matter
at what sacrifice! Half a pound each for the capitalists, a pound
each for the workers—this is the way out of this period of
starvation and ruin. Consumption by the starving workers is the
basis of, and the condition for, the restoration of industry.

Clara Zetkin was quite right when she told Kautsky that he was
“slipping into bourgeois political economy. Production
is for man, and not man for production ....”

Independent Herr Kautsky revealed the same dependence upon
petty-bourgeois prejudices when he bewailed the “cult of
violence”. When, as far back as 1914, the Bolsheviks
argued that the imperialist war would become civil war, Herr
Kautsky said nothing, but he remained in the same party with
David and Co. who denounced this forecast (and slogan) as
“madness”. Kautsky failed entirely to understand
that the imperialist war would inevitably be transformed into
civil war; and now he is blaming both combatants in the civil
war for his own lack of understanding! Is this not a perfect
example of reactionary philistine stupidity?

But while in 1914, failure to understand that the imperialist
war must inevitably be transformed into civil war was only
philistine stupidity, today, in 1919, it is something worse. It is
treachery to the working class; for the civil war in Russia,
Finland, Latvia, Germany and Hungary, is a fact. Kautsky
admitted hundreds and hundreds of times in his former writings
that there are periods in history when the class struggle is
inevitably transformed into the civil war. There is one now, but
Kautsky is found in the camp of the vacillating, cowardly, petty
bourgeoisie.

“. . . .The spirit that inspires
Spartacus is virtually the spirit of
Ludendorff . Spartacus is not only encompassing the
doom of its own cause, but is also causing an intensification
of the policy of violenceon the part of the Majority
Socialists, Noske is the antipode of Spartacus . . . .

These words of Kautsky’s (quoted from his article in the
Vienna Arbeiterzeitung) are so infinitely stupid, base
and despicable that it is sufficient to point to them without
making any comment.The party which tolerates such leaders must be
rotten to the core. In the light of these words of
Kautsky’s, the Borne International, to which Herr Kautsky
belongs, must be appraised on its merits as a yellow
International.

As a curiosity we shall also quote the argument advanced by Herr
Haase, in an article entitled “The International at
Amsterdam” (Freiheit, May 4, 1919). Herr Haase
boasts of having proposed a resolution on the colonial question
which states that “it is the function of an alliance of
nations organised on the lines proposed by the International
before the advent of socialism ... [please note this!
][Interpolations in square brackets in
quoted passages have been introduced by Lenin unless otherwise
stated.—Editor.];... to administer the
colonies primarily in the interests of the natives, and
then in the interests of all the nations that are united
in the alliance of nations ....”

A gem, is it not? According to the resolution proposed by this
pundit, before the advent of socialism, the
colonies will be administered not by the
bourgeoisie, but by some sort of benevolent, just, sentimental
“alliance of nations”! Is this not tantamount to
whitewashing the most disgusting capitalist hypocrisy? And these
are the “Lefts” in the Berne International ....

So that the reader may make a more striking comparison between
the stupidity, baseness and despicableness of the writings of
Haase, Kautsky and Co. and the real situation in Germany, I
shall cite one other brief passage.

The well-known capitalist, Waither Rathenau, recently wrote a
book entitled, Der neue Stoat (The New State). It is
dated March 24, 1919. Its value as a theoretical work is nil. But
as an observer, Waither Rathenau is compelled to admit the
following.

“We are a nation of poets and thinkers, but
in our auxiliary occupations [im IVebenberuf] we are
philistines ......

“Only the extreme monarchists and the
Spartacists now have ideals ....”

...“The unvarnished truth is that we are
heading for dictatorship, proletarian or pretorian. (pp. 29, 52,
65).

Evidently this bourgeois considers himself as
“independent” of the bourgeoisie as Kautsky and Haase
imagine they are of the petty bourgeoisie and of
philistinisin.

But Walther Rathenau towers head and shoulders above Karl
Kautsky, for the latter snivels, and like a coward hides from the
“unvarnished truth”, whereas the former frankly admits
it.